Love Never Fails!

Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. 1 Corinthians 13:8

The holiday that emphasizes love is upon us, and everywhere we see the evidence of it with hearts, chocolates, and flowers enticing us to show our love by giving these gifts to special people in our lives!! One of the values of this time of year is that it reminds us how important it is to focus on and invest in the people we love! Relationships fade and falter when those involved don’t do that!!

The responsibility of showing love during this season seems to fall more on males than females. They are charged with remembering their loved ones with extravagant gifts, dozens of flowers, or expensive romantic dinners! It reminds me of the story that is told of a brother and sister who found a box of love notes their parents had written early in their married life. The boy said to his sister, “These are surely not the names they call each other now!”

Love changes over the years. It can take on many different forms and expand to include many different aspects of our lives. In 1973, Randy and I lived in Snellville, Georgia where he was the youth minister and I was a teacher in the county school system. We lived in a house that the church owned and allowed us to occupy. Randy attended school at Emory during the week and worked at the church all weekend. I taught all week, tutored after school, and helped him during the weekend. That year a gift for Valentine’s Day was the last thing on my mind, but when I came home after school, Randy had left me a gift, but not anything traditional. It was a bouquet of roses he had drawn on a piece of white paper with the words, “Love never fails.” It was the most special gift to me, and it remains to this day my all time favorite gift!!

There are so many different ways of showing our love in this world of today, and the word love is used for everything from a movie that we enjoy to a food that we eat, even to a team that we support and to whom we pledge allegiance. So, how do we define love and what it really means in our own lives? How do we show to the world the distinctiveness of Christian love? Burt Bacharach said it best when he wrote, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love, It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of.”

Jesus is the ultimate example of love, so how can we reflect this? First, I think love has to be a priority in our lives. Love isn’t a so called “grey area” in the Bible because Jesus gave it priority of all the other words when he said, “Love the Lord you God with all your heart, soul, and mind, and love your neighbor as yourself.” Every thought, response, and action needs to pass through the fine line of love or it means nothing at all.

Secondly, we must understand the importance of love! God established love as the impetus for obedience. Love fulfills the law because if we truly love every person because he or she is a person, we will not desire to hurt or violate them, thus we will never break the law. Love never fails.

Finally, we need to embody the nature of love. When we demonstrate Christian love as Jesus teaches, the world distinguishes us from the rest of the world. Jesus said “the world will know us by our love for each other” not by our agenda. It’s as though Jesus has given the world the right to judge whether or not we are His follower simply based on our love for others. The virtue of love distinguishes us as Christians.

Love values the other person, it entails the opening of one’s heart to another, and love comes at a cost. The story is told of a minister who officiated at many weddings. The nervous grooms would always ask, “How much do I owe you for doing this?” The reply was always said with a smile, “Aw, just pay me what she is worth!” The minister made a lot of money because to each man his bride was of extravagant value.

From the very beginning, God’s plan was to develop a people that reflected His character. God never loved us not because we had something to offer him, but rather because He had something to offer us. This character, this gift is love, and love never fails!